A letter from Sicily, by Oliver Brandish
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this letter, written in 1876, a young Englishman travelling in Sicily writes to his sister after visiting a sulphur mine, where much of the ore was carried to the surface by boys.
My dear Dorcas, You will think me a poor correspondent, for I promised you a letter from Palermo and you are getting one from a dusty inn in the south of the island instead, written on the lid of my hat-box. I have been down a sulphur mine. I went because Mr Garlick, who buys sulphur for a firm in Liverpool, offered to take me, and because I have always wanted to see the inside of the earth. I have now seen it, and I am not sure I wish I had.
The country round the mines is the strangest I have ever looked upon. Nothing grows. The hills are the colour of old bone, and the smoke from the kilns, where the ore is burned to draw off the sulphur, hangs over the valley in a yellow haze that catches the throat and makes the eyes stream. Don Calogero, the overseer, met us at the pit mouth, a broad man in a straw hat who carried a lamp in one hand and a cigar in the other and seemed to think the cigar the more necessary of the two.
We went down by a sloping gallery cut in the rock, with steps so rough that I had to feel for each one with my boot. The air grew hotter at every turn, until it was like walking into a baker’s oven, and the hewers at the bottom were working stripped to the waist, glistening, their picks striking sparks from the walls. And the walls themselves, Dorcas! Where the lamplight touched them they glittered pale yellow, like lemon ice, and in one chamber the crystals stood out from the rock in clusters as fine as any in a museum case. Don Calogero broke one off and gave it to me. I have it in my waistcoat pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, and the cloth still carries the acrid smell of smoke from the kilns.
It was on the way up that I saw the boys. They carry the ore from the workings to the surface in sacks upon their backs, and there were perhaps twenty of them on the steps, coming up one behind another, bent nearly double under loads that I could not have lifted. The smallest cannot have been more than eight years old. Each of them, as he reached a landing, gave a kind of groan, not loudly, as if it were part of the work, and then went on. Not one of them looked at us. Don Calogero told me cheerfully that a strong boy may climb those steps thirty times in a day.
I came out into the daylight and sat down on a stone and could not speak for some minutes. Mr Garlick said that I should get used to it, that the boys are better fed than many in the town, and that England buys the sulphur and so has no business to complain. I daresay he is right about the last. I have the crystal still, and it is beautiful, and I find I cannot look at it without hearing that groan on the steps. Do not read this part to Mamma.
Your loving brother, Oliver
“The writer is more fascinated than horrified by his visit to the sulphur mine.”
To what extent do you agree with this statement?
You should comment on:
You must refer to the text to support your comments.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.